7 Desserts From The 1950s We're Really Not Too Sure About

Delicious desserts like Baked Alaska, Chiffon pies, and Coconut Cream Cake came from the 1950s. But that era also produced bizarre desserts — like an abundance of Jell-O molds and concoctions made of incongruous ingredients that didn't resemble anything edible. In a world of cocktails, cakes, and meatloaf, how did perplexing dishes like tomato soup cake or Jell-O and sour cream combos take shape? Good riddance!

Women in the 1950s were either ostracized working women or stay-at-home mothers. Lacking our modern and efficient appliances, homemakers had constant work. Convenience became king. Due to this mindset, food in the 1950s was about elevating canned or boxed ingredients. Although women who used canned ingredients were considered lazy or inadequate, the popularity of brands like Jell-O, Hellmann's, and Campbell's provided a new outlook on cooking. The era of Jell-O salads and fruit cakes came from the busy minds of housewives needing a quick way to combine and create wholesome dishes daily. Sometimes, this resulted in questionable recipes. Let's take a look at these seven 1950s desserts that we're not entirely confident we'd eat.

Ah, the beloved Jell-O salad. We know it was popular, and we even get it. Kind of. Jell-O was, and remains, inexpensive and relatively easy to prepare. Yet we wonder why the '50s were so obsessed with this molded dessert. It became a staple of the decade, requiring a coveted refrigerator to set the dish. Even far back in history, gelatin-based dishes were a sign of opulence because they took time and a chilling system to prepare (via SeriousEats). When the Jell-O brand emerged, instant gelatin changed how these elite meals were made.

But who knew there were so many things you could toss in your gelatin and deem ready to eat? From fruits to nuts to veggies encased and formed into rings or braids, there was no shortage of creativity when it came to this dessert. While some Jell-O salads are bearable and still eaten among potlucks and holiday dinners today, there are so many that probably should've never been created. Our fave odd ones include a coffee Jell-O salad made with raspberry gelatin, strong coffee, and topped with whipped cream; a truly baffling ocean-themed salad using lime Jell-O and pear halves, complete with cream cheese and cinnamon; and this Christmas-y lime Jell-O salad involving cottage cheese, pineapple, pimento, and walnuts.

Candle salads were all the rage in the 1950s. It's not something we thought we'd be saying either. Still, there were a lot of variations of this dessert. All of these desserts involved some sort of fruit — either with a hole cut out to resemble a candle or put together in a shape that seemed candle-like — and placed on a bed of lettuce. Remember, it's a salad. Once again, the use of imagination in the kitchen was in full force — meaning a lot of questionable architecture went into achieving the luminescent look.

Del Monte's version includes several little molds of gelatin mixed with cottage cheese, milk, and sugar and topping the mounds with canned peach halves. Assembled in a circle and finished with cranberry sauce around each "candle, this dessert looks as weird as it sounds. A simpler version, which debuted in the 1920s but gained more popularity in the 50s, required only the intricate construction of a banana standing up in a pineapple ring and topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. Picture it and you'll understand why we're not missing this dessert.

Then there was Hellmann's grand rendition that debuted in the '60s — a little late to the party but nevertheless determined to join in the candle-making fun. In a team effort with Ocean Spray, their version used mayonnaise, cranberry sauce, and orange-flavored gelatin to create a surprisingly realistic candle dessert.

With its extreme versatility, fruit cocktail was a quintessential '50s dish. Equal parts appetizer, dessert, and topping, fruit cocktail was used for various recipes. From being stuffed into jello molds to sitting pretty on top of sliced ham, it was an easy way to add some color and fruity flavor to any dish. To make a dessert fit for the '50s, make any sweet treat and add a can of fruit cocktail. On it, in it, around it — all of the above! Today, it's a simpler blend of fruits usually served as a breakfast side dish, but back then it was amplified to its max.

Wild combinations started to pop up as canned fruits became increasingly popular. There was the fruit cocktail coffee cake advertised by Del Monte, which featured a coffee cake ring buried in Del Monte's canned fruit cocktail, a classic blend of grapes, pears, pineapple, peaches, and cherries. Also not to be forgotten, though we wish we could, were gelatin-molded fruit Bavarian cakes. This dessert involved a mixture of Bavarian cream and canned fruit cocktails molded into a jiggly cake. Even if the separate parts of this recipe seem harmless, the whole seems sickly sweet with a peculiar texture. We'd rather stick with the pre-dinner cocktails than any of these fruit cocktail desserts.